The Phantom of the Jazz Age – 100 Years of Gatsby
Its 100 years since The Great Gatsby was published. Jay Gatsby has followed the author, F. Scott Fitzgerald to Paris determined to uncover the truth about his identity. Is Scott prepared to tell everybody the truth after all these years? The story you are about to read is inspired by real life conversations. essays and events.
August 20th 1925. 14 Rue de Tilsitt, Paris. It’s 5.00 AM and the seconds hand on the clock continues its fussy and exacting circuit on the bedside table. Outside the apartment the asthmatic pant of an accordion mingles with the sound of a hand-cranked hurdy-gurdy. It all sounds strangely chilling and nonsensical. He used to hear the same thing back in his apartment in New York. Perhaps he was back in New York. He seemed to be anywhere but here. ‘You never did explain where I came from,’ says a voice that comes from the shadows. On the ceiling above the window, the first dim shapes of the morning move like waltzing couples. No one leads and everybody follows on a dancefloor that is full of cracks — huge white pearly cracks that erupt in the middle and then furrow a spidery path to the lavish mouldings around its edges. The voice was right; the story of Gatsby was full of cracks too. All that stuff about being James Gatz of North Dakota and his breezy journey from the shores of Lake Superior to the millionaire beaches of Long Island had been the last in a series of lies told to cover other lies, cracks to cover other cracks, but Scott had made the lies and the words so beautiful that nobody had ever noticed. In fact there had been so many lies told over the years that he had long since lost sight of anything that resembled the truth.
Despite consuming the best part of a bottle of gin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, celebrity author and self-anointed King of the Jazz Age, hasn’t yet fallen to sleep — and even if he has, he isn’t aware that he has. It would happen like this sometimes. If you were lucky the gin would sozzle you into a blithe, anaesthetised state until four or sometimes five in the morning but all too often its spell would break in a matter of hours. Day after day, week after week, three o’clock in the morning would be the dark hour of the soul. After what seemed like days of solitary pillow hugging he would reach for the bedside light, look at the clock, curse and return to his pillow. At this point it would occur to him that all those hours of dedicated liquoring had been a complete waste of time, shame and effort. He was awake. He was still awake. Instead of limiting itself to other internal events and the restorative needs of the mind and body, the neural attention of his brain would be poured into the repetitive trivialities of life and work. On occasions like these he would try to trick himself back to sleep. The trick was in making yourself think that you had fallen asleep already and that what you were doing now was dreaming. The cars buzzing outside the window would become the roar of a chariot race, the cries of the revellers pouring out of the bars would be the crowd of the Colosseum, cheering him on in his second hand sports coupé with Zelda at his side, a champion of the people. It was thoughts of triumph, like these, that would get him to sleep. After a few hours the thoughts and the sounds would resolve themselves into an unfathomable jumble of unmade matter and the lack of meaning would lull him to sleep. This is when Gatsby would arrive — the point of collapse — when all manner of disconnected shapes would drift into his head and melt into the most satisfying yet irrational images. This is when he would stop trying to make any conscious sense of anything. When it did arrive, Gatsby would be standing there in his dazzling white suit, champagne glass in his hand, drawing wolfishly on a cigarette. Wolfsheim had been right, he really was quite handsome to look at. A man of medium height with Prince of Wales hair the colour of corn, a protruding, square jawline and eyes that look green one minute and blue the next. His mouth, now pursed around the butt of his smoke is sensitive, taut and vaguely contemptuous. ‘Just tell them who I am, old sport. Tell them the truth.’ Scott would just smile and shake his head. Nobody gave a damn about the truth. The cars, the sex, the booze, the parties — even Myrtle’s cute little dog — they had all been far more entertaining.
The novel had been published on April 10th — Good Friday to be exact, a day that had a certain amount of form for things that came bouncing back to life and causing the profoundest and most eternal kind of chaos. Telling people the truth was one thing. Getting them to listen to the truth and then believe that truth was something else. No matter how many times he tried to tell them they never wanted to hear it. Earlier that evening, Scott had received a letter from John Peale Bishop, a friend from his college days. Bishop had been taking issue with something that Scott had said. It had been a confession of sorts. The whole thing had started back in June when Bishop had shared his thoughts about the book. According to John, everybody back home was saying what an obscenely good book he had written, a book that left all his contemporaries behind. Their friend Wilson had been wild with jealousy. With a little more subtlety and a little more accuracy, Bishop had told Scott that he would soon have every living American author, and most of the dead ones, wiped from the memory of the critics.
That wasn’t the full story with Bishop though. There was one thing that Bishop didn’t like about the novel and that was Gatsby himself. For all the brilliance of the prose and the blankets of sparkling imagery, Bishop thought Gatsby lacked definition. Scott protested, obviously. He had spent the last twelve months reading Homer’s Odyssey and nobody ever told Homer that Odysseus lacked definition. Bishop understood that Gatsby should remain a vague, mysterious person. He got that Gatsby should be seen behind a mist but behind that mist he thought he should be solid. Scott’s editor, Max Perkins, had felt the same and after reading the first drafts had made some suggestions about how he could change this. Where did this skyrocket millionaire come from? All the other characters in the novel had been so vividly brought to life, but there was barely anything at all about Gatsby. He knew that he turns up on Long Island and builds the largest, most fantastic mansion where he hosts summer-long parties for hundreds of guests, and that he longs to be reunited with Daisy, his long lost love. He might be a businessman, he might be a criminal, he might be Catholic, he might be Jewish, he might be a hero, he might be a spy. There were lots of wild rumours in the book but there was nothing ever fixed or certain about him.
Scott had taken the advice of his editor and tried to flesh him out with a few more details, Max’s criticisms helping to strain out some of the novel’s broken cork. Returning to the novel in Rome he had added all the stuff about the millionaire Dan Cody and his yacht, the money that Jay had inherited from Cody, the trips around the West Indies and the Barbary Coast, his encounters with Cody’s gold-digging mistress, Ella Kaye. Zelda had also been a really good egg by drawing pictures of what Gatsby might look like until her fingers ached. Gradually, from words and a few casual pencil strokes, Gatsby had come bouncing to life. It had reminded him of one of those animated films he had seen in Paris, the one about the Pierrot clown by Reynaud. The film may have been crudely stitched together from literally hundreds of separate sketches, but when these images hit the screen in one fast continuous flow there was a magic there all the same.
At the suggestion of his editor, Max Perkins, Scott had made some more changes, but he had made it so the changes would satisfy his publisher without ruining the book’s suspense. This had been critical to the book’s design. It was the lies that Gatsby tells and the speculation about him that provided the spirit and the energy of the book. They were a mystery that had to remain unsolved. Scott had learned this from the lies that his father Edward had told him. It was only ever in stories that you got to know the truth about things. In real life it was always guesswork. Scott’s eyes returned to the cracks in the ceiling. This is where Gatsby came from: from the cracks that had appeared between this world and the next. Gatsby lived in his cloud-topped tower as invisible as air, the dream lover who lived in a dream, a man who would walk so lightly that he would leave only the faintest of footprints in the vacuum that was New York. Jay Gatsby, he told Bishop, had started as one man he knew in Great Neck before changing into himself. The man, who he had known as Max, ran a speakeasy on West 58th Street in a building owned by crime lord, Arnold Rothstein, the so-called Tsar of Broadway. He had met him at a party back on Long Island at the home of a mutual friend. He sailed a yacht, he raced expensive cars and could count the stars of film and opera among his legion of friends and hangers-on. In short, Max represented all that was fabulously preposterous and impossible about New York and everything that Scott sneered at ordinarily. He was the bona fide Mr Make Believe. Scott had taken his mannerisms, his outrageous claims and his Old World affectations and used them in the novel. The rest of Gatsby, Scott admitted, had been himself. Over the next twelve months Scott would try to glue the two things together, taking the skin and the bones of Max and adding his own essential organs. Over the summer of 1923, this loquacious roughneck would acquire the poetry and romance of Scott’s own creative nervous system. Despite his best efforts though, the amalgam had never been complete and the figure of Gatsby had been left lacking in some ways.
No matter how many times he told Bishop, Bishop would refuse to hear it; the hero of the novel was the author himself. Bishop didn’t want to know. Bishop got that Scott had filled Gatsby with his own “emotional life” but didn’t understand Scott’s resentment of the critics’ “failure to perceive his own countenance behind Gatsby’s mask.” He said it was vain to suggest that he was Jay Gatsby. Worse than that, Bishop thought Scott was denying himself the credit he deserved as an artist. In the letter received that morning, Bishop had told Scott that he ought to be flattered. He had finally achieved what every great novelist set out to do: he had produced a purely creative work with sincere and radiant characters. Bishop couldn’t praise it highly enough. Gatsby was a whole new character in fiction. He had broken new ground. Scott’s talent was at last being recognised — why did he have such a hard time taking the credit?
He should have been happy. That was something they could agree on, but Scott had been a total bag of nerves ever since Gatsby was published back in April. He still owed $6,000 in advances to his publisher, Charles Scribner’s Sons, and would need to shift 20,000 copies of the book to settle that debt. He had started writing it in the summer of 1923 at 6 Gateway Drive in Great Neck, the Long Island party home he rented with Zelda. But there had been too many distractions in Great Neck. He had started and scrapped Gatsby some five times already, never quite getting it right. One human shipwreck after another would wash up on his beach, each one demanding more and more of his time. Life in Great Neck had become one endless house party. He was beginning to feel like Great Neck’s unofficial lighthouse. The light above his door would blink and by 7.00 PM all the intoxicated people of Long Island would be splashing around at his door. But as wild as it was, Scott was getting nothing written. He was loafing around for days, often weeks at a time and the few thousand dollars he had left in the bank had been spent already. Creatively speaking, he was getting flabby. When Max had scribbled a message on a publicity shot of the Fitzgeralds on the lawn of their home on Long Island it was becoming clear that his friends in the fast-lane had begun to invade every aspect of his personal and creative life: “Enroute from the coast. Here for a few days business. How are you and the family, Old Sport?” It was July 1923 and Max was in St Louis. He’d spotted the picture in the St Louis Post-Dispatch, torn it out and mailed it to Scott. What he was doing in St Louis was anyone’s guess. There was some serious shit going down, he knew that much. Large accumulations of ‘snow’ had been reported in Los Angeles and it was believed to be drifting east. Max would click his fingers and Scott would be expected to snap into action.
But it wasn’t just Max, it was everyone. Scott felt for a half-smoked pack of Omar on his bedside table and lit one. His fingers smelled of oranges. There had been an empty bottle of gin on the table and a bomb trail of orange peel around it. Thinking about Great Neck always got him edgy as hell. Living there had been like standing at the gates of Babylon — a great place for celebrities and a great place for celebrity vampires. It had been taking ten times longer than usual to get anything written and much of what he had written during the summer of 1923 had been too ragged to show to Scribner. He drew on his smoke and wheezed a gruff laugh. There had been too much time drinking, and too much time raising hell. The result of all this was some really bad writing habits. No sooner would he sit down to write than there would be some intoxicated rag or other banging at his door demanding his time or money. And there were that whole bootlegging caper with Max which was a lot more serious than he’d thought. The authorities were getting wise. This was a bomb that was ready to blow and when it did blow there would be casualties, big, big casualties.
The couple’s response to this constant stream of interruptions and the danger posed by their new friends had been to relocate to Europe — first to Saint-Raphaël in France and then to Rome. But the money wasn’t the only reason for the switch. People had often asked him why he needed to go Europe to write about life in New York. But it had to be that way. He hadn’t been entirely honest with his editor Max Perkins when Max had asked him about any of this. As far as Scribner was concerned, Scott and the family were heading to Europe because the cost of living was so much cheaper on the continent. Apartments were cheaper, hotels were cheaper, food was cheaper, and the nannies needed for Scottie were also cheaper. He had been a bit more honest with his friend Carl van Vechten. He had told Vechten that it was because Europe was where all the great literature got written. And this was partially true. Joyce was there. Stein was there. Shelley and Byron had both been in Rome and their pal, the poet John Keats, had died there. Charles Dickens had derived many of his best ideas from his travels in Italy and scenes and images you found in novels like Dombey and Son and Little Dorrit bore the glow of his experiences in Florence, Rome and Genoa. There was another reason for the move there too. It was something that Scott had stumbled upon during his first trip to Europe in 1921. It was only when an American was abroad that he had any firm idea about what it was to be an American. The American identity only acquired definite lines and features when observed at a distance of 4,000 miles or more. It was only then that the vapours would clear and its phantom soul materialised. To put it plainly; it was only when he was in Europe that he knew what it was to be an American. And this was a book about America, more specifically about New York.
For a short time the move to Europe had looked like it was paying off. A letter from Max Perkins had said that the first printing of the book, priced at $2.00 a copy, had shifted almost 20,000 units. A second printing of 3,000 copies had been ordered, some of which Scott had in his apartment in Paris, but ever since the order had been placed, sales of the book had plummeted. Flailing restlessly from side to side in his moist, warm bed, he turned this one thought over and over in his mind, trying to thresh out a possible explanation. Maybe it was the title. He’d told Perkins that he thought ‘The Great Gatsby’ was junk. It had been a little too close to Le Grand Meaulnes — The Great Meaulnes — one of the most talked about books in France at that time. There was also that thing about the irony of the title. He didn’t think people would get it. Gatsby wasn’t great, that much was obvious, and so he had supplied a handful of alternatives, among them Under the Red, White and Blue, Among the Ash-Heaps and Millionaires, Gold-Hatted Gatsby, and Trimalchio in West Egg.
Scott had been in the Dingo Bar on the Rue Delambre with Hemingway that evening. It had started with a few German beers before they had both had moved on to the spirits. Beneath the glow of the gin they had chewed their way through all the toughened gristle of life, liquor and literature. ‘The first lesson one must learn in life,’ Scott had bellowed at point, ‘is that there are no lessons to be learned in life!’ Ernest had roared with laughter and ordered champagne to celebrate. At one point, Scott had been so fried that Hemingway thought he’d died. He’d sat there on his stool in a state of semi-paralysis, his face as white as a sheet, his upright rigid body dripping with sweat, just staring at the bar lights ahead of him. Ernest said it was like he’d just blacked out. Scott had been talking about scrapping the whole idea of being a novelist and trying his hand in Hollywood. It wasn’t the first time he’d talked about it. The same bloated declaration would burst from his lips as regular as clockwork every six months or so. Earlier in the day he’d received a batch of press-clippings from his publisher in New York. Perkins had sent him the first three months reviews. Some of them were just wild. The Nation, whose review he’d been crazy to see, had nailed it: “The theme of a rather soiled or cheap personality, transfigured and rendered pathetically appealing through the possession of passionate idealism”. The novel still had its flappers and gargantuan drinking parties, the reviewer conceded, but this time, F. Scott Fitzgerald, had given us something unique in Jay Gatsby whose cheap and curiously imitative imagination was a rather surprising triumph. For others it was a “remarkable feat” and “extraordinary pleasure”, a novel that had finally established him as an artist. Some were a little more off the boil. Scott’s friend Mencken, ‘America’s Greatest Literary Critic’ if the byline in his column was to be believed, had told him privately that the book contained better prose that had ever been written in America but his review for a paper in Baltimore had been rather muted by comparison. There was charm and beauty in the writing yes, but the story itself about a romantic and preposterous love affair was little than a glorified anecdote, and not too plausible a one at that. Mencken thought that despite the “fine texture” and “brilliant finish” of the writing it didn’t manage to mask the basic triviality of a story whose hero was overly sentimental.
It was thoughts like these that got stuck on repeat at 3.00 am in the morning. At twenty minute intervals he would lean on his side and flash the torch on his bedside clock, the thoughts harassing him into mindless, cyclic actions. His doctor had told him that he had become a little too conscious of sleep. He’d even begun to hate himself a little, or rather hate that part of himself that couldn’t switch off and go to sleep. It was difficult to say what stopped him from dropping off — the dead hand of the past or the high intentions of the future? What was that prayer his mother used to say at bedtime? Now I lay me down to sleep. If only it were that simple. In preparation for the sleep that never came he would lay out an extra pair of pyjamas at the foot of the bed should the heat of the Paris summer lather him in sweat as he wriggled restlessly beneath the covers. Domestic and professional matters would whir in his head like cogs. All he really wanted was for sleep to scoop him up and cradle him in its arms of sweet consoling nothingness.
The play was another thing he was nervous about. Some producer on Broadway had contacted Scribner during the Easter weekend of the book’s release, desperate to get his hands on the rights, but the man they were hiring to write the script had cut his literary teeth providing lurid and gossipy gangster stories for the Police Gazette. He could see it all now; there would be a noisy and exhilarating explosion of sound and colour. Sequins would sparkle and the shooting streaks of light coming from the jewels on the bangles, bracelets and necklaces of the girls at Gatsby’s parties would illuminate the night like comets. But that was what worried him: the pure kinetic energy of the party scenes would blind them to the poetry of the book. The glitter clouds would gather and gold would settle on their eyes like mist. Before long, the novel would bring to mind all the vacuous extravagancies of American life that had showered the first part of the decade in crisp green dollar bills. But there were things buried in its pages every bit as scandalous and prophane as the crimes in Gatsby’s back-story. Scott had secrets to tell, things that had remained hidden for years, even from Zelda.
In the cellar of the old Fitzgerald house in Rockville were secrets as dark and as chilling as anything written by Poe. He could see the old house now. A three-storey wood dwelling with green blinds around its windows. He would start in the top storey bedroom and would drift like vapour, down through its floors to the basement. In the basement would be a box and in the box, a body. Someone would be whistling Dixie and from the box would come a scratching noise. It was the time of the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln was still in his presidency, and his great uncles and aunts would be in all their southern finery, dancing ‘the danse macabre.’ Lincoln would be in his swimming pool. He has not had a swim all summer, and he is lying on a yellow air mattress with the gorgeous blue canopy of sky above him. The sun rips through the leaves of the trees and a dandy-clothed assassin glides silently towards him. The figure pulls out a Delinger pistol and shoots him in the back of the skull. There is the roar of a theatre audience and the pool turns red. White with horror, Scott is possessed by an urge prise open the lid of the box, and instead of seeing a cadaverous Jay Gatsby, his yellow hair all matted, and his lips curled back to his teeth, he is met with his own face smiling manically back up at him. Then would come the snarl: ‘One for the road, Old Sport?’
The drinks he had shared with Hemingway had started in the morning and continued through to the early evening. They had left the bar at eight and arrived home within the hour, both deliciously and violently stewed. Hemingway had helped Zelda in putting him to bed. Ernest didn’t like the apartment. Granted it was a little small and unfashionable, but for the needs of Zelda, himself and Scottie it was comfortable enough. Ernest said he had found it gloomy and airless. He couldn’t understand why the King and Queen of the Jazz Age had chosen to stay on the bloodless and insipid Right Bank of the city instead of the infinitely more edgy Latin Quarter. James Joyce was there, Gertrude Stein was there. Anybody who ever dared pass for an artist was there. The Right Bank of the city was for businessmen and diplomats and anybody else who had packed their country with them in their suitcase and clung on to the past like a parrot with a cuttlebone.
On the table in the lounge, Hemingway had found Scott’s ledger, deliberately left open at his earnings for the year. It was all meticulously done, of course, so meticulously done in fact that Ernest had remarked that it was like the log of a ship — the charts and crucial data of a gold-hatted Odysseus pushing furiously against the tide and boasting about how much cash he had pirated away during transit. Practically everything else in the apartment looked like someone else’s. It wasn’t the couple’s furniture and they weren’t their books on the shelves. The only exception were the copies of Scott’s first two novels bound in light blue leather with gleaming gold titles down the spines. The books stood pride of place in the middle of the shelf by the sofa, positioned like his ledger as props in his little magic show.
Shortly before nine o’clock, Ernest had flopped him on the bed and Scott had lay there for the best part of an hour in just his socks and shirt, gazing at an old dollar bill he kept like a prize in his wallet. The greenback note was still crisp and new. It had been given to him by his father in January 1917. The note had been part of the recently printed ‘sawhorse’ series. His father Edward had liked the symbol of the cross on the back. It had reminded him of the tool used by America’s early pioneers to cut wood. Edward had used one himself on the family farm in Maryland. It also reminded him of the Southern Cross that had adorned the Confederate flag in the Civil War — a symbol of the blood, sweat and tears of those brave American patriots as well as the hope and inspiration that Catholics the world over derived from the crucifixion. It was a symbol of the sacrifices made by Christ and those made in pursuit of the Republic.
On the front of the bill was a portrait of George Washington and to the left of him a small vignette engraving of Columbus and the crew of the Santa Maria discovering America. Next to this was a red seal. The seal implied ownership of part of the National Debt. As a Catholic, Scott had always been intrigued by the idea that a bank note was in some way ‘redeemable’ at the treasury. In a strange way, money did offer a ‘redemption’ of sorts. After a lifetime of labour, application and demeaning social imbalances it could lead you to a golden afterlife, just like it had for Scott at the beginning of the decade when he had been earning an obscene fortune as America’s most promising author. If you looked a little closer at the seal you could see the key of authority and the scales of justice. The bill was indeed a beautiful thing, thought Scott, as he held it up to the moonlight. The reverse side of the note, the greenback side, was an absolute work of art. There was so much love here, so much detail. Scott rolled his finger along the rich geometric scrollwork around the banknote’s borders. Money was a work of art and so was earning it. Gatsby had known this too. Who needed a book of American History when you had a dollar bill like this in your wallet? Everything you needed to know about America was right here. Its discovery, its first President, its wars, its healing, its liberation.
Scott had been looking at the note again when Gatsby had appeared. “Isn’t it time to tell them the truth, old sport?” The words beat in time to the ticking of the clock that was stuck on endless repeat on his bedside table. Gatsby really didn’t understand it. People didn’t want to hear the truth. They loved the rumours and the secrets. It was the mystery that kept him alive. It was all part of an esoteric tradition that stretched back to ancient times. It was the thankless pursuit of chasing words around the page that led you to a higher consciousness. There were things in life that couldn’t be understood exactly, but felt rather. Things that were just outside your reach. They didn’t call it the Mystery of Christ for nothing. The biggest revelations in life were always those that made you work for them. People didn’t need to understand the composition of a book any more than they needed to understand the composition of the sun. Understanding it didn’t add to its warmth or its brilliance any. Scott had learned a lot about the sun from Europe. It had baked them violently during that first gruelling trip in 1921. That year had been one long, hot summer — hotter than any other summer on record. If people were crazy enough to think the sun was getting colder every year they had only to visit Rome in June when it was still pushing the mercury at midnight. That’s where Gatsby had been born. Not on the second trip, but on the first trip to Rome when Scott had spotted the fresh green shoots of redemption among the city’s acres of dusty ruins. Somehow, the future had become much clearer here. America had seemed much clearer here.
As he fell back into unconsciousness Scott thought he could hear the languorous opening bars of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue rising like smoke from the moist, warm street below. It was 1925: the Age of Gold and the Age of Gods. Einstein was changing the way we saw outer space, and Freud was changing the way we thought about ‘inner space’. There was America and there was Europe. There was old and there was new. There was stagnation and there was progress. There was loss and there was glory. ‘Ah, glory!’ thought Scott as he drifted back to sleep, deep in the thrall of his own imaginary heroism. Within moments he is back in Saint Paul. It’s mid-September 1919. An early frost sparkles on the road outside the houses and the air is crisp and still. At 599 Summitt Avenue, a jack-o’-lantern pumpkin sits uncarved at the top of the steps of a brownstone rowhouse and a postman is ringing the doorbell. In his hand is a letter from Mr Scribner. It is addressed to a Mister Fitzgerald. He is to be a famous author.
Inexplicably, it starts snowing.
By Alan Sarjeant
An illustrated teaser for Odyssey of An American Dreamer, the biography of an author, a novel, an age. Click here to listen.
Sources
‘From John Peale Bishop, August 1925’, Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Random House, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Margaret M. Duggan, 1980, pp.175-176
In May 1924 Scott had written to Thomas Boyd: “I’m going to read nothing but Homer + Homeric literature—and history 540-1200 a.d. until I finish my novel + I hope to God I don’t see a soul for six months. My novel grows more + more extraordinary.”
‘Dear Max, December 20, 1924’, Dear Scott, Dear Max, Cassell, 1973, pp.88-90
The Great Gatsby – Autograph Manuscript, Fitzgerald, Princeton University, Manuscripts Division, Firestone Library, F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers (C0187), Box 4, p. 2. In Scott’s handwritten manuscripts Nick talks about Gatsby walking so lightly upon the ground that he barely left any footprints “in the vacuum that was New York”. It was later discarded.
‘To John Peale Bishop, August 9, 1924’, A Life In Letters, Penguin Books, 1994, pp.125-126. Scott wrote, “he started as one man I knew and then changed into myself — the amalgam was never complete in my mind.”
‘To John Peale Bishop, August 9, 1924’, A Life In Letters, Penguin Books, 1994, pp.125-126. Scott wrote, “he started as one man I knew and then changed into myself — the amalgam was never complete in my mind.”
‘From John Peale Bishop, August 1925’, Correspondence of, pp.175-176
‘How Are You and the Family Old Sport?—Gerlach and Gatsby,’ Matthew J. Bruccoli, Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual 1975, pp. 33-36. I only recently discovered that the source of cutting was the Daily Magazine of the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch dated July 20, 1923. It had never been previously identified.
‘Dear Max, April 10, 1924’, F. Scott Fitzgerald to Max Perkins, Life In Letters, pp.65-66
‘Dear Scott, October 27, 1925’, Dear Scott, Dear Scott, p.122
It was published as The Wanderer in England by Constable and Company in 1922. Translated by Francois Delisle.
‘Dear Max, October 27, 1924’, ‘Dear Max, November 27, 1924, A Life in Letters, p.84, p.85
A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway, Scribner, 1964, pp.151-152
‘Fitzgerald on the March: The Great Gatsby’, Carl van Vechten, The Nation, May 20, 1925, pp.575-576
‘From H.L Mencken, April 16, 1925, Correspondence, p.158
‘Fitzgerald, The Stylist, Challenges Fitzgerald, The Social Historian’, As H.L.M Sees It, H.L Mencken, The Evening Sun, Baltimore, May 2, 1925, p.9